Puerto Rican Socialist Party

The Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP) was a Marxist and pro-independence political party in Puerto Rico that was founded in 1971. The party endorsed Marxism and Leninism, and it gained a following in the labor movement, student movement, and community organizations. It saw the struggle of Puerto Rico as a part of the struggle for national liberation and against capitalism of the oppressed, colonial and neocolonial countries especially in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Americas, and it supported internationalism. The socialist movement in Puerto Rico grew in the 1960s and 1970s despite police repression and terrorist activities from right-wing exiled Cubans and pro-Statehood Puerto Ricans, and its members ranged from Christian socialists to clandestine militants. The party reached its peak during the Vietnam War era (late 1960s-early 1970s), but it declined in the early 1980s due to contradictions in its socialist and nationalist views, and the party dissolved in 1993.